In the end this exact statement of names, for which he had prepared himself with such laborious care, enabled Lincoln to sum up with absolute conclusiveness: 

The cases I have mentioned are the only acts of the “thirty-nine,” or of any of them, upon the direct issue, which I have been able to discover.

To enumerate the persons who thus acted as being four in 1784, two in 1787, seventeen in 1789, three in 1798, two in 7804, and two in 1819-1820, there would be thirty of them.  But this would be counting John Langdon, Roger Sherman, William Few, Rufus King, and George Read each twice, and Abraham Baldwin three times.  The true number of those of the “thirty-nine” whom I have shown to have acted upon the question which, by the text, they understood better than we, is twenty-three, leaving sixteen not shown to have acted upon it in any way.

Here, then, we have twenty-three out of our thirty-nine fathers “who framed the government under which we live,” who have, upon their official responsibility and their corporal oaths, acted upon the very question which the text affirms they “understood just as well, and even better, than we do now”; and twenty-one of them—­a clear majority of the whole “thirty-nine”—­so acting upon it as to make them guilty of gross political impropriety and willful perjury if, in their understanding, any proper division between local and Federal authority, or anything in the Constitution they had made themselves, and sworn to support, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the Federal territories.  Thus the twenty-one acted; and, as actions speak louder than words, so actions under such responsibility speak still louder.

When you come to evidence about a large and complex state of affairs, which is the kind of fact that so many of the arguments of practical life deal with, though you will still be dealing with a fact, yet the very nature of the fact changes the value and the character of your evidence.  It is a comparatively simple matter to determine whether a certain woman faced forward or backward as she was getting off a street car, or whether the eggs of a sea urchin do or do not begin to germinate under the influence of a certain chemical substance; but it is far from simple to determine whether a free elective course has or has not inured to greater intelligence and cultivation in the graduates of a certain college, or whether the graduates of another college where the classical course is maintained have keener and more flexible minds and more refined tastes as a result of their study of the classics.  In such cases as these the citing of direct evidence brings on you difficulties of a different kind from those you face when you are establishing a single, simple fact.  Here you will usually depend on two main sources of evidence:  statistics, and the evidence of recognized authorities on the subject.